That's actually not a bad idea at all. The NES carts have 9 unused pins that no one ever used. Those pins go directly to the bottom of the NES. So then you'd simply need to make a board that has the ROMs connected to the cartridge slot in the same way as normal AND to the programming circuitry, which should be shut off in the case of a NC on the bottom of the board. I'm sure this would be easy to do (just make a cable that uses those 9 pins from the bottom of the board and hooks them up to the computer).
I was thinking about mounting a socket on the outside of the cart so I dont have to have a big ugley hole in the case it should have enoth clearence to fit inside the NES
Not sure you'll need a socket at all if you can set it up so you can program it through the expansion slot on the bottom... though with games with PRG and CHR that could be difficult... you could do it, pretty sure about that. But you'd need to set up some crazy crap with multiplexers and stuff like that.
if I was going to make something that compicated I would make a cart with SRAM's it would be a lot less expencive to bulid something that could program those anyway
hmm... if the 9 pins just connect to the expansion port, It'd be fairly easy just to make the programmer an expansion that sat on the bottom of the nes
That's true. That's an even better idea, actually. You could use those pins to control which chip is being programmed and stuff and send the data. Though you'd probably need to do it serially (but I'm not sure what pins go from the expansion slot to the cart slot)
What? It shouldn't... that's the beauty of it. You just need a special cartridge. Though I really think we've gotten to the point where you should simply say "screw it" and make a programmer that's completely independent of the NES console itself, so you have direct access to everything through the NES cart pins
For you, maybe. It's not really that difficult to do. No more difficult than a lot of the mods we've been talking about doing to various things elsewhere. Not much harder than wiring a cart slot to a Radica Genesis, for example, at least from the hardware standpoint.
